


When Your Young are Submerged in Quicksand

by StrangeBird



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Babies, Friendship, Gen, Humor, No Romance, Parenthood, Thresher Maws
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-15
Updated: 2013-05-15
Packaged: 2017-12-11 23:55:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/804719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrangeBird/pseuds/StrangeBird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wrex has the first-time father jitters and Shepard helps. Kind of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Your Young are Submerged in Quicksand

**Author's Note:**

> For the sake of this story I've imagined that the birth process for krogan is somewhat like that of sea turtles. Uh. With a drastically reduced number of eggs? Definitely not a biologist!
> 
> As always, un-betaed, so apologies for any mistakes!

Shepard gasped for breath.  
She bolted into a sitting position, jarred from deep sleep by the unrelenting wail of the vid-comm link in the next room.  
She turned her face to the the bedstand where the clock glared 1:73 GST.

No one called at that time unless something was very, very wrong.

In haste, she tore off the sheets and stumbled towards the console, catching her toe on the corner of her desk in the process. The weight of the curse on her tongue was heavy, and she bit down on it as she slammed the button on the terminal. The glow of the vid-screen lit up the darkened office, illuminating a familiar face against a backdrop of construction and sand-blasted edifices.

"Wrex?"

"Shepard," Wrex roared. "You've got to help me."

Nothing, but nothing made Wrex beg. Her blood ran cold.

"What's wrong?"

"It's Bakara she's--" he paused, seemingly just taking in her tousled hair and sleep-clammy skin. "You look like shit."

"I--" she blinked. "It's the middle of the sleep cycle here."

"Oh," he grunted. "You'll live. Look, Bakara's laying her clutch."

"Yeah? Congratulations."

Krogan vocalizations could be surprisingly expressive. Right now, Wrex's was laced with a fine veneer of hysterics. "Shepard, she's going off to lay them in the desert."

"Uh," she managed elegantly.

"And what's more, she's doing it alone. Wouldn't let me come with her. Just took off at dawn with seven of the females from the old camp."

"That's not exactly alone," she pointed out.

"We have this incubating facility that the salarians helped us set up. But no, she goes shaman on me. Says she'll lay the eggs as nature intended. And she's not coming back until they've hatched and if I follow her she says she'll revoke my parenting privileges."

"Can she do that?"

"This is Bakara we're talking about. She can do anything."

Shepard squinted at the screen. Was he...twisting his hands? A young-looking krogan with yellow markings approached him with an armful of blueprints from the left-corner of the screen. He opened his mouth, and Wrex ensnared him in a stasis field before he could get a word in.

"Wrex," she sighed, regretting the question before she'd even asked it. "Do you want me to come over?"

"Don't be ridiculous Shepard" he said, words belying the clearly pleading look in his wild red eyes. "I know how important it is to you to keep playing buddy buddy with those tadpoles on Sur'Kesh."

She pinched the bridge of her nose to stave off the inevitable headache. "I'll catch a shuttle tomorrow."

"Okay," he nodded. "I'll find a thresher maw for us to kill."

 

 

Years later, Wrex would tell that the saviour of the galaxy's first visit to Tuchanka since the end of the Reaper Wars was, all things considered, a minor event. It didn't feel like it. The moment she stepped off the shuttle she was swarmed by a horde of enthusiastic krogan. Warily she accepted a full set of bleached krogan teeth from an aged male with an impressive hump, who gazed on her beatifically when her hand brushed his to take it. Another pressed a stein of premium sovak juice into her hand, which she did her best to finish though it burned like a sticky sweet whisky going down and packed a meaner punch in her liver. One placed a crown of tangled black weed upon her head. 

Then they all began to sing.

It was the most ungodly sound she'd ever heard.

They parted during their chorus to reveal Wrex, grinning at her with ill-concealed mirth. This was something to ponder. With krogan, smiles usually signified that:

a)someone had accepted their breeding request, or

b)you were about to die.

Shrugging it off, Shepard counted herself lucky to be the anomaly.

"Shepard!" He clasped her hand in a vice and pumped with fervour. She smiled at him through her grimace as her shoulder popped.

"Wrex!"

"How does it feel to be the first human with her own krogan battle song?" His voice had a way of cutting through the din. Hers did not.

"Indescribable!" she yelled.

He gave a hearty laugh and pulled her towards a ground vehicle. The assembled krogan clamoured, pounding their chests and stomping the ground till the dust rose in a great cloud that surrounded the carrier. She kept her eyes fixed on that cloud of dust until it faded into the ruined Tuchankan horizon behind them.

Wrex's home was in the middle of a krogan encampment that was growing more permanent daily. Here were the foundations of a housing complex, there a commerce centre. The krogan there swarmed them curiously until Wrex thundered that the leader of the krogan and the saviour of the galaxy needed space. But, if it pleased them, they could feel free to continue singing songs of tribute. Shepard hoped fervently that they would not. 

That night they gorged themselves on a pulpy mash of root vegetable, which reminded her of taro, and steaks of space cow, which Wrex had decided to have cooked up when he ran over a pair on their way to his home maybe not so quite by accident. She was surprised to find the food not only edible, but palatable. After that they drank ryncol and sovak late into the night, shooting pyjaks from his second floor balcony.

She breathed in the dusty air of Tuchanka and was content.

Everything was right in the galaxy.

 

 

Except that it wasn't.

A day passed, and he dragged her to tour new hospitals and sundry structures and not a word was said of Bakara or the eggs. Another day they spent combing the devastated Tuchankan countryside for a thresher maw that was fast encroaching on an encampment a few hundred clicks off from his own. Nary a trace of the maw, nary a thing about the younglings. They returned tired, thirsty and surly.

On the third day after arriving home from a quick rendez-vous with Grunt in the morning (he was stamping out the sparse pockets of reaper ground units from the war), Shepard had had enough. They returned home for lunch. As they waited, Wrex showed off the new nursery wing they'd made just next to his house with the kind of enthusiasm he more commonly reserved for killing things with big guns. She pointed across the street to the clean, squat building she knew damn well housed the incubating facility, and he shrugged it off. If he heard the question in her voice, he ignored it.

She wanted to wait for the right moment, she really did. But she was Shepard, and he was Wrex. They were more-or-less past the sledgehammer approach and right into explosions and rocket-launcher territory.

"So did Bakara bury your unborn children in the sand yet?"

Subtle as an earthquake.

He whipped around and narrowed his red eyes at her until they were little beads, like the end of a sniper's laser.

"Don't know. Hope the carrier didn't go down in quicksand," he grunted at last.

"Yeah, so." She cleared her throat. "How's...that?"

Damn good talk. She could have kicked herself. But this was how they'd hashed things out before, and she couldn't see them changing just because miniature Wrexes were on the horizon.

To his credit, Wrex just heaved a sigh.

"Feels like someone tore out my gut and left it in the street for the varren to pick over."

"Good thing you've got two," she joked, but it felt weak, even to her own ears. "Look Wrex," she tried another tactic. "Bakara's a good one. I'm sure she knows what she's doing."

"I know," Wrex rumbled. "And I know the old ways are important. But if our ancestors had the technology we've got now, wouldn't they want to use it? Isn't that the best thing for our children?"

"You have no idea how many kinds of unqualified I am to answer that question."

"Shepard--"

"Fine. You want my opinion? I think you're just going to have to put a little faith in her. Like she did in you."

"Right," he said quietly. Then again with growing confidence, "right."

He trailed his fingers over the cocoon-like nest of soft blankets that would soon house the first brood of infants Tuchanka had seen in more than a millennia.

Shepard thought that that was the end of it. Mission accomplished, she ducked through the archway to exit back into the main house in search of another Tuchankan example of fine dining. But as she did, she heard Wrex's voice, though at first she hardly recognized it as his, so low and hesitant it was.

"Do you think I'll make a good father?"

His eyes met hers imploringly a moment before he tore them away, huffing and forcing himself to stand erect as if he pretending the admission of doubt had never escaped. She marched across the nursery and laid a hand on his shoulder, and yanked hard until he looked down and his eyes met hers again.

"The best," she said. 

There was a long pause, and Wrex's eyes flickered closed. He seemed to war with himself before shaking his head and reopening them.

"Well yeah," he swallowed.

"Well yeah," she agreed. "But Wrex. It's okay to be scared."

He huffed at that too. After a moment he shifted. "Can't be worse than Sovereign."

"Or Kalross."

"Or your clone."

"Or the undead reaper baby."

He blinked his round red eyes.

"Right, you weren't there for that one. Sorry. Look, important thing is? You're going to be great. It's gonna be hard at first, and yeah, once in a while you're gonna screw up. But it's going to work out in the end. And you're not doing it alone. They'll be the mightiest krogan in centuries, leaders of Clan Urdnot, sons and daughters of Urdnot Bakara and Urdnot Wrex!"

Wrex stood dumbfounded, staring at her. She dropped her hand from his shoulder, suddenly feeling self-conscious. She cleared her throat. Outside, a pyjak chattered.

Then he swept her up in the fiercest, most bone-crushing hug she'd ever been on the receiving end of. Tears leaked from her eyes, and not only because of the way her internal organs were squeezed together tighter than they were ever meant to be.

He placed her on her feet again, and they both coughed, awkwardly. Shepard rubbed the back of her neck. Wrex itched the red scales of his crest.

Outside, the pyjak still chattered.

"You still good to kill that thresher maw?"

"Yeah," she said. "Let's ride."

 

They did eventually find the thresher maw. They tried to take it out with the tank, but the main gun jammed because Wrex was too damn cheap to ever do any maintenance, and they had to finish it off on foot. Peeking out as poisonous spittle dissolved most of her cover and the trembling earth all but promised to swallow him up, she let out a whoop. He belted out a great guffaw, and as tandem they unloaded the contents of their rifles into the maw.

They argued a bit about who got to drive back, and Shepard won only because she was covered in slightly less of the viscous thresher maw innards and the driver's seat had newer upholstery. When they pulled up home Wrex leapt victoriously from the vehicle onto the dusty road, ready to launch into the tale of the maw's defeat. But for once, the krogan milling about his abode paid him no mind. In fact, they were few and far between.

He looked ready to say something when Shepard jabbed her thumb in the direction of the nursery where a crowd was forming at the entrance. It could only mean one thing.

He barrelled towards the low building, mowing down any krogan who got in his way. Shepard waited a moment before following at a more leisurely pace.

Inside the dwelling, the squeals of the krogan younglings filled the dry air, as the krogan assembled looked on with a hushed wonder. A tired-looking Bakara sat, content, and handed Wrex one of the little things. He cradled it like a nuclear doomsday device-- with not a little fear and a substantial amount of awe.

"Twenty-three," Bakara informed Shepard as she passed through the doorway. "Two never hatched and one is across the street for treatment."

She could feel her face split into a grin.

"Big family, Wrex," she said. "Congratulations you two."

"Would you like one?" Wrex asked her, quite seriously.

"No, no!" Shepard made a placating gesture. "I mean, it'd be an honour. But I think Tuchanka's first family in years is better off together. On their homeworld."

"Alright then," he looked secretly relieved. "You can be their battle-master when they're old enough." Behind him, Bakara chuckled. Shepard couldn't help but marvel at this new life, this tiny, perfect thing, already with the same conniving red eyes of her old friend. The youngling in his hands squawked a little too loudly, and Wrex rapped it gently on the head. It quieted immediately, and moved to gnaw on his finger. Wrex beamed like the burning krogan sun.

Shepard amended her mental catalogue of krogan smiles:

a)granted breeding request  
b)you're going to die  
c)proud parent

 

Everything was right in in the galaxy.


End file.
